PC Olympics: Badminton and Jordyn Wieber

Aug 1, 2012

RUSH: Eight female badminton players were disqualified from the Olympics today for trying to lose matches the day before. This is according to the Badminton World Federation. They made this announcement after a disciplinary hearing, and now the world wonders whether or not the sport of badminton will ever recover from such an outrageous controversy. The players are from China, South Korea, and Indonesia. They were accused of playing to lose in order to face easier opponents in the future. They were booed by spectators. They were warned by badminton officials on Tuesday night. All four pairs of players were charged with not doing their best to win a match, and abusing or demeaning the sport.

And again the question must be asked, can badminton survive? What about the rule you have a tournament set up so that it’s to a team’s advantage to lose, what did they expect would happen? This is a politically correct world. You know, they coulda gotten out of this if they said, “We weren’t trying to lose. We were trying to make it fair. We were facing vastly inferior competition and we didn’t feel it would have been fair to just smack ’em. So we dialed it back, to give the fans a better show, and to give these people a chance to win.” If they’d-a said that, it would have been tough to penalize ’em. But they didn’t think of it, because they are competitors.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Steve in Fort Wayne, Indiana, great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello, sir.

CALLER: Hey, it’s great to be on, Rush. In Fort Wayne, they are covering the Chick-fil-A.

RUSH: The local media?

CALLER: Yeah, the local media is. So that’s pretty cool.

RUSH: Well, I’m told that our affiliate in Kansas City, KNBC is also doing the same thing on the radio.

CALLER: I think that’s great. Hey, I wanted to say something about the badminton. I was having my breakfast this morning and was watching it, and they were just acting, you know, terribly offended that they used this strategy of trying to play easier opponents.

RUSH: Wait, wait, wait, wait. Who was acting terribly offended?

CALLER: The commentators.

RUSH: The commentators on NBC?

CALLER: Yeah. Yeah. And I wanted to know, what’s the difference between what these athletes did with badminton and what the Olympia federation did to Jordyn Wieber, who wasn’t allowed to compete even though she was good, even though she was better than many of those who got to go to the —

RUSH: It’s an interesting thing. That’s political correctness. Let me see if I understand this right. Now, you tell me if I have this right.

CALLER: Okay.

RUSH: She was denied to participate in the all-round final, right?

CALLER: Yeah, the individual all-round.

RUSH: Individual all-round final because each team can only have two members from that team —

CALLER: Exactly.

RUSH: — and she is better than 99% of all of the competitors all over the world, but she’s third on the US team in terms of scores?

CALLER: Yeah. And if you read the rule it basically is just socialism. It says, we want to spread people being seen on TV and that kind of thing around. And what I find so interesting about the badminton controversy is, the only difference is the athletes took it in their own power.

RUSH: Well, but they were still —

CALLER: It wasn’t done from the top, it was done from the grassroots. And that is exactly why people are mad with the Tea Party and Cruz and everything today. It’s so similar.

RUSH: As you say, all they were trying to do was follow the spirit of the rule.

CALLER: Exactly.

RUSH: Here we have in the Olympics, political correctness. It’s like the All-Star Game in baseball. There is a requirement that everybody play. And a lot of people don’t like it because it takes away the competitive advantage and fans who do want to see certain people play have to get pulled out of the game, baseball, you can’t go back in once you’ve been pulled out. But that’s not really competition. The only thing on the line there is who gets home field in the World Series, which is no big deal. This is a silly rule. It’s on par with then we first heard about high school teams, junior high school football teams being penalized at the start of a game a couple touchdowns, if they were that much better than another team. So here these badminton people said, “Look, we’re gonna play down to the level of our competition so that we can have an easier time of winning this thing down the road.” The rules are the rules, and they simply tried to be politically correct in their own way. That’s a good analogy that you have.